Seminar Series: Peter Dauvergne
Peter Dauvergne, professor at the University of British Columbia, is the fourth speaker of the series. His presentation is titled "Big Brand Governance: Turning Sustainability into Global Power and Business Value."
Big brand companies are increasingly turning to 'corporate sustainability' to govern operations and achieve competitive gains, especially within globalizing supply chains. The uptake has been accelerating over the last half-decade. This partly reflects the increasing importance of environmental issues like climate change as well as growing eco-consumer demands, more effective nongovernmental campaigns, and stricter state regulations. It also reflects changes and rising challenges within the global political economy, including the rapid growth of emerging economies, population pressures, resource scarcities, and commodity price fluctuations. Yet, as Peter Dauvergne will discuss (based on his research with Jane Lister), the main driver among these many influencing factors is business. Multinational retailers and manufacturers are defining and adopting sustainability strategies to achieve traditional corporate goals: reducing costs, improving quality and performance, maintaining consistent supplies, increasing sales and markets, and building brand reputations. Sustainability defined in this way is reinforcing and further concentrating big brand economic power. And, as Dauvergne will explain further, it is also contributing to rising big brand governance power to leverage nongovernmental organizations, guide governments and control long chains of global production.
